There's a specific moment when you realise Adjust isn't the right tool for your app. For me it was when I got to the pricing page and found a "Contact Sales" button where numbers should have been.
I don't have anything against Adjust. It's a serious product used by serious companies. AppLovin bought it for around $1 billion in 2021, and they've continued investing in it since. The fraud detection is good. The audience builder works. The analytics are thorough.
But when your app has 300 users and makes £400 a month, calling someone's sales team to negotiate an attribution contract feels absurd.
If you've had that same feeling, here's what else exists.
What Adjust actually charges
Adjust doesn't publish pricing, which tells you something about the target customer. From conversations in developer communities and forums, most estimates put their plans starting around $500-1,000/month, scaling with install volume and feature set.
That's perfectly reasonable if you're a gaming studio spending £100k a month on user acquisition. At that level, the fraud detection alone probably pays for itself.
At smaller scale, the maths just doesn't work. Spending £6,000 a year on attribution when your app makes £5,000 a year is a guaranteed way to lose money.
The alternatives
AppsFlyer
AppsFlyer is Adjust's most direct competitor. Similar feature set, similar target market, similar pricing approach (talk to sales).
They do offer a free tier called the Zero plan. It covers up to 10,000 monthly active users with basic attribution. If your app is below that threshold and you just need to know which ad campaign drove an install, the Zero plan is functional.
Beyond that, you're back in enterprise pricing territory. AppsFlyer charges per install, typically $0.05-0.07 each. That includes organic installs too, which feels a bit grim — paying to be told that someone found your app by searching the App Store.
Branch
Branch is less of a pure attribution play and more of a deep linking platform that includes attribution. If you need tracked links that open specific content inside your app, Branch handles that well.
The free tier is decent for small apps. The problem is setup complexity. Universal links, app links, the SDK, dashboard configuration — it takes a full day to get working properly. I wrote about this in more detail in Branch alternatives.
If you specifically need deep linking alongside attribution, Branch is worth the setup time. If you just need attribution, there are simpler options.
Kochava
Kochava has a genuinely useful free tier called Free App Analytics. Unlimited installs. Basic attribution. A clean dashboard that shows you where users came from.
The free tier doesn't include fraud detection or advanced attribution models, but for a small app, you probably don't need those. You need to know if your Reddit post drove more installs than your TikTok video. Kochava's free plan can answer that.
The paid tiers are more reasonable than Adjust or AppsFlyer, though they still assume a certain scale. Worth a look if you want something between free and enterprise.
Singular
Singular's main selling point is cost aggregation. It pulls ad spend data from all your platforms — Meta, Google, TikTok, Snap, whatever — and shows you return on ad spend in one dashboard.
That's useful if you're running campaigns across five platforms and losing track of where your money's going. Less useful if you're running one TikTok campaign and one Reddit post per week. At that level, you already know where your money went because you can count the spending on one hand.
Airbridge
Airbridge is a Korean-built attribution platform that's been growing outside Asia. Their pricing is more transparent than most competitors — they actually publish tiers on their website, which is refreshing.
The focus is on "people-based attribution" and web-to-app journeys. If a lot of your traffic starts on your website and converts inside the app, Airbridge handles that transition better than most tools.
For pure mobile-to-mobile attribution (social media post → app install → purchase), it's more platform than you need.
LinkOwl
This is the one I built, so read this section knowing that.
LinkOwl started because I couldn't justify any of the tools above for my own app. I was making maybe £15 a month and wanted to know which of my marketing links actually drove those purchases.
The approach is different from traditional attribution tools. You create a tracked link, share it wherever you want (TikTok bio, Instagram story, Reddit post), and when someone clicks through, installs your app, and eventually buys something, that purchase gets tied back to the original link. The purchase tracking works through RevenueCat or Superwall webhooks — no custom server-side code needed.
There's no monthly fee. You pay 5p per attributed purchase. Nothing happens until someone actually buys through one of your links. The minimum charge is £5, so tiny amounts just roll over.
The SDK is a few lines of code. No deep linking. No universal links. No postback URLs. The whole setup takes about ten minutes.
It won't give you fraud detection, audience segmentation, or multi-touch attribution. It answers one question: which link drove that sale?
How to decide
Here's how I'd think about it based on your situation:
If your app makes less than £1,000 a month and you're doing your own marketing, you don't need Adjust, AppsFlyer, or Singular. You need something that tells you whether that thing you posted yesterday actually worked. LinkOwl or Kochava's free plan will do that.
If you're spending between £1,000-10,000 a month on paid ads and need to see return on ad spend per campaign, look at AppsFlyer's Zero plan first. If you outgrow it, then start the enterprise pricing conversations.
If you're spending more than £10,000 a month on ads across multiple platforms, Adjust or Singular is probably the right call. The cost is a rounding error on your ad budget and the fraud detection has real value at that spend level.
The wrong choice is the one that costs more than the problem it's solving. Attribution should make you money by showing you where to spend more and where to stop. If the tool itself is a significant expense relative to your revenue, you've picked the wrong tier.